Take Two

ksandra

New member
So I'm going to start off by saying I don't know how long I'm going to keep this blog, but my therapist suggested I try journalling and traditionally I've been terrible at maintaining any kind of written record, but hey try anything twice right?

My intent is for this to be a lot more stream of conscious than well written blogging because I've had a lot of life things change and I've changed a lot, but that also means the way I've done polyamory for the last thirteen years doesn't necessarily work anymore and I need somewhere outside of my community and my peers to try to figure this out. So I apologize in advance if this is rough.

Current Cast of Characters:
Me, Ksandra, 30, f, queer, ENTP, currently career transitioning for the second time in five years because the career I switched into is slowly dying. Learning to live with an autoimmune disease and I almost have the hang of it.

Grey, 30, m, straight, anchor partner, INTP, workaholic, high anxiety cucumber, community leader, one of the most genuinely good people I've ever met, sarcasm is a love language. If I thought I'd been in a game changing relationship before Grey I was wrong.

Fiona, 30, f, straight?, a former partner of Grey's who he is currently interested in

Marguerite, 22, f, queer, partner, E??P, model, exceptionally emotionally aware and communicative, currently working through a fairly traumatic event that happened last year, moving in with Leo in September

Leo, 26, m, queer, partner of Marguerite, owns a local sex-related store, moving in with Marguerite in September

Jane, 24, f, straight-ish, INTJ, best friend, major platonic anchor relationship, same sense of humour, needs a plan for everything, is a genius at making a plan for everything, sarcasm is also a love language, lives on the other side of the country .

Kerouac, 39, m, straight, ENFJ, partner but the relationship is on its way out

Karen, 29, f, bi, ENFP, ex girlfriend, Kerouac's partner

Voldemort, 24, m, straight, INTJ, massively abusive ex fiancé, calling him Voldemort somehow makes this easier to deal with.

Last year I left Voldemort after I found out he'd been keeping a food in our home that I was massively allergic to without telling me and then repeatedly saying I was too sick to breakup with him, while also being wickedly passive aggressive and lying about a bunch of things. Since breaking up with him my life has changed completely, in many ways for the better, but it's understandably left me with some trauma and some trust issues.

Towards the end of the summer Grey and I went from being very close friends (who were secretly in love with each other and secretly convinced the other person wasn't), and oh boy has it been a game changing relationship. Around the same time I was laid off from my 9-5 salaried job. After being laid off I discovered that my exact career has been shrinking because the job duties have been split between a different role in marketing and another, highly technical role in IT. As of now I've been scraping by freelancing but at a fraction of what I used to make.

Early this year Karen and I broke up and realized we didn't actually like each other as people - not that anyone did anything bad, we just don't get along. We each kept dating Kerouac. Shortly after I had emergency surgery, which was fairly traumatic and around that time Marguerite had a similar surgery and through talking about it we realized we liked each other and started dating.

Recently Grey and I went on a trip to see Jane and other friends from when I lived in that city and during the trip things started growing apart with Kerouac to the point where I realized I couldn't sustain a super involved relationship with him anymore. We negotiated a deescalation at the beginning of June, but I've since come to realize I no longer see him as a romantic interest and through a series of events we haven't been able to meet up to properly breakup. I'm fairly sure it's mutual, and I'm hoping we can be friends.

Grey's interest in Fiona started in December when they ran into each other at a party after being broken up for almost a year and came in in full swing in April, which stirred up a fuckton of insecurities for me that I've never really dealt with before. We've done a lot of work and processing together and I've been able to realize that due to all of the high stress things in my life I'm feeling very unstable with polyamory right now and Grey has decided to delay pursuing things with Fiona as it's only ever been a very casual relationship and interest. I'm almost at a place where I'm ready to start talking about this again, but still experiencing a ton of anxiety around the issue, which is part of why I'm here.
 
Tonight Grey and I went to the birthday party that a newish friend was having. It was neat because she lives in the same neighborhood as me and I'm so used to having to travel far into the city to do anything that this was a welcome change.

We were supposed to talk more about Fiona and everything around that today, before the party, but I was feeling extremely depressed when I woke up so we delayed it until tomorrow morning and to be honest I'm glad it worked out that way because Dee and his polycule were all there.

Dee is a good friend, he's very similar to Grey except he's much bubblier and I'm not madly in love with him. Dee and one of his partners have been together for seven years and started monogs but have since opened up pretty successfully. He has another partner, and then his original partner is involved in a triad as well. Getting to watch them all interact with each other was good because they all seemed to genuinely like each other and be pretty secure in their individual relationships and of course I can only know what it looks like from the outside, but it was a nice reminder after Kerouac and Karen that polycules can also be friends.

Lately it feels like my brain has the worst case scenario playing on repeat. I know a lot of that has to do with what's happened in the last year (TBD in another post) and it doesn't have to be worst case scenario, but it's almost like I don't feel like I have the emotional energy to handle the uncertainty right now.
 
Long Post with Backstory

Yesterday Grey and I finally sat down and talked about Fiona.

For some back story they had dated casually for just over a year in 2016 and then she broke things off without much explanation. Grey wasn't super upset because it had really only been a casual thing.

In December we went to a German Sparkle Party/warehouse rave thing and he ran into her again there. At that time she and I met and I ended up having a very uncomfortable conversation because she wanted to talk about what Grey was like in bed. This wasn't something I wanted to do with someone I had just met. She and Grey made out that night and I walked away, not really because I was uncomfortable, I was just bored and some of my other friends were dancing but as I was leaving she kind of grabbed my wrist and said "no don't go!", which also wasn't a great interaction. I'm not crazy about being touched by strangers and it felt like she just wanted me to wait around for them to finish making out?

So after the party nothing really happened until a couple months later when Grey mentioned he was going to ask her to grab drinks, partially because he missed her and partially because he wanted to know why she broke things off like that. He brought it up a couple times, but kept saying that she hadn't replied and didn't think anything was going to come of it until all of a sudden he had a date scheduled with her.

I didn't really find out about this from him either, he was showing me something on Facebook and their chat window popped up and I glanced at it without thinking about it. This was upsetting because when we had been negotiating our relationship I had walked away from those conversations thinking that we had mutually agreed to tell each other when dates were being discussed and Grey had thought we had agreed to tell each other when dates were confirmed. For me, I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under my feet, especially because I had been thinking that wasn't a thing that was going to happen at all and suddenly they were going on a date two days later.

Now, I've been polyamorous for almost fourteen years and I'm not perfect, but I've been doing this enough times that I think I have a pretty good set of coping tools for navigating the trickier parts. Suddenly, it was like they just didn't exist and I was back to the very first time a partner had ever gone out with someone. I was extremely emotional and we had almost a week of difficult processing conversations and I wasn’t feeling less emotional by the end of them.

To make matters worse, during that time Kerouac (who I was still dating) told me that Karen had been with a partner who had tested positive for Chlamydia. While visiting the doctor to get checked I found out that I'm allergic to virtually all of the antibiotics used to treat it. What that means is if I were to get sick I would have to be hospitalized during the course of antibiotics and on a very high dose of steroids. So basically I'd feel sicker before I felt better.

This added another level to the conversation with Grey because Fiona is monogs and self identifies as “sleeping around” and while our community is very strict about testing regularly, she had admitted to Grey that hers wasn’t. In the end, after a couple of dates, Grey decided not to pursue anything at the time because he wanted us to do more research and see what that meant for sexual health. Especially because we’re barrierless. During his dates I was a complete anxious mess and not able to understand why. There was a degree of fear around being left at the time, but Grey is such an amazing partner, he’s only every behaved in ways that’s reaffirmed how much he cares about me and how much he loves me.

Since then I’ve been working with Grey, talking with friends, and talking to my therapist trying to figure out what exactly is going on and we’ve been able to figure out a few things:

-towards the end of the relationships things with Karen and Kerouac got really competitive and unhealthy, largely due to Kerouac not being able to say no and set healthy boundaries around his individual relationships, partly because Karen and I realized we just don’t really like each other as people

-not having a job and having such a hard time finding one, even with freelancing work, has me feeling like my life is very insecure overall, no matter how loving and wonderful Grey is and at this time I’m running very low on emotional energy to navigate a lot of the work that goes into polyamory

-there are some general first time jitters because Fiona is the first person Grey would be seeing outside of me since we started dating

-Grey is truly a gamechanging relationship, and has mentioned that’s a mutual feeling, so things are more intense, more vulnerable, more involved than I tend to experience in relationships, I also identify as grey romantic, which means feelings of NRE or “in love” are rare and mild, but with Grey we’re nine months in and I’m still in the throes of NRE

-I have a pretty strong fear of being replaced

What all of this has meant for me is that Grey and I have had a very honest conversation around if he wants to find more romantic partners, we would need to renegotiate our relationship for the time being into something less involved. At this moment Grey would like to do some casual things with Fiona, but he isn’t looking for romance.

We’ve both acknowledged that between Voldemort and Karen and Kerouac I’ve had a string of really bad to just bad experiences with polyamory, the dark side of polyamory if you will. There’s nothing we can really do about that, just be aware of it, and honestly I’m going to keep hanging out with Dee and his polycule too. Also this is a thing me and my therapist talk about.

First time jitters will just have to be handled mindfully, they’re a normal part of polyamory.

Grey and I have become pretty secure with each other, so it’s easier to enjoy all of the feelings while also being in a place of security within the relationship.

My therapist and I talk about the replacement fear and I discuss it with Grey too.

Right now Grey and Fiona still hang out as friends and that’s actually been like, 90% fine. So it’s starting to get easier to make a mental transition into being fine because sex on top of drinks isn’t that big of a deal for me? She’s also seeing less people since her last STI test and I’ve done a ton of research into transmission rates, symptoms, etc so I feel more comfortable from a sexual health perspective.

I’m still having a lot of anxiety around mentally going through my evening while they’re on a date. I know I’d be able to do things with friends or call Marguerite and maybe see her, but the last few times I was fine for a few hours then I got hit with this incredible tidal wave of anxiety and I’m really afraid of that happening again. They’re going out for drinks tonight, and I’m kind of hoping I can give him my blessing if he’d like to do more the next time they see each other.

To be clear, Grey is welcome to do whatever he wants with whomever he wants, it wouldn’t break a relationship agreement if they went home together. He’s decided that for now he wants to wait until we’ve talked and processes and I’m in a better headspace and I am deeply grateful for the space to do so.

TL;DR - there are a lot of reasons why I’m struggling with polyam feelings a lot more with Fiona and I’m almost at the point of being fine, but not entirely.
 
I'm having a difficult mental health day. I've been sick for almost two weeks with a slight intermission on Friday and Saturday. Luckily it's just a cold (and then a mild sinus infection), but two weeks without really having the energy to do things like clean or go out or work on some client projects and I'm pretty miserable. I guess it's the downside of being an extrovert, I need to interact with other people to truly feel recharged.

I'm just feeling well enough for some light activity tonight so I'm taking myself to see a major musical in the city because it's been on my bucket list for ages and there were some discounted tickets. However, this also means I'm scrambling to at least get some of the visuals done for a book layout.

I guess right now I'm writing because I've just had a major anxiety spike and my therapist recommended I try journalling around them. Grey mentioned he might meet Fiona and her best friend for drinks tonight. They were going to last night but neither of us were feeling well and Marguerite cancelled because she gets sick easily so he decided to come over and we kind of passed out watching Buffy together. It was nice to see him, but I was so out of it I wouldn't exactly call it quality time, however I'm also not exactly at a deficit right now and I think I would enjoy a day to myself today if I wasn't feeling so crappy.

ANYWAY, part of our relationship agreement has been to tell each other when we're thinking of making plans with people we're interested in and then to just give each other a head's up when the plans are confirmed. We had some miscommunications around that when he and Fiona first decided to meet up so it's become a bit of an anxiety trigger for me now.

It's towards the end of the work day here and I haven't heard whether he's meeting up with them or not and rational brain knows that that probably means they haven't talked about plans today, or Grey still isn't feeling great so he isn't going to try and make plans, but lizard brain is a jerk. Lizard brain is convinced that they *have* made plans and Grey just hasn't mentioned it yet because of non-malicious reasons and I'm going to end up finding out by accident. Lizard brain is great at ignoring rational brain.

I think what I've been able to identify is that I need to know that my partner will tell me things ahead of time like dates, relationship escalations, changes to plans, because it makes the hyper-vigilance part of anxiety relax. I know I don't have to be on the lookout for bad things, because I will hear about them (and good things, and neutral things, but lizard brain doesn't care about those).

Voldemort also lied, like a lot, and I was forever finding things out when they were a crisis - like our power got shut off because he stopped paying our hydro and Kerouac didn't lie about things, but he wasn't able to sit down with me and be like "so just so you know x is happening". Like one time he and Karen made these huge thanksgiving plans with her family and I found out when I asked to see him, but neither of them had a) invited me or b) given me a heads up that this was happening and they didn't *have to* but holidays had been a conversation between the three of us a couple times so we all knew that they were important things to all of us. So the feeling of discovering things is pretty emotionally present for me right now.

I don't expect any person to be perfect, no one can read my mind about what kinds of things I need to know, it's rough though figuring out what each person needs to and wants to be aware of when it comes to relationship dynamics in polyamory. Generally I need to know that eventually we can figure it out and be able to have those conversations together in the way each person needs to have them. With Kerouac and Karen we never really got there no matter how much processing and conversation happened.

The other thing I've realized is that I think I have a very deep seated expectation of when things should happen by. I think it came out when Grey was on his dates as a sudden tidal wave of anxiety a couple of hours in and I think it's coming out now because for me if I was going to go out in the evening I would have that figured out by now. However, what I'm not taking into account is that I live an hour outside of the city centre by transit so if I don't have plans figured out by like, 7/8pm, I'm not going out. Grey and Fiona also live in the same neighbourhood and they live in the middle of the city so it's way easier for them to meet up spontaneously. I'm not entirely sure how to engage with this expectation because it feels pretty subconscious and it's causing some pretty strong feelings, but at least it's something I can bring up in therapy now.

For the moment I'm going to try not to make this Grey's problem. I don't want him to feel rushed or like I don't trust him to tell me and besides, hearing it from him without asking will go a long way to starting to build some trust around knowing he'll tell me. Wish me luck.
 
The musical was great. I'm so glad I got to see it. I don't tend to do stuff like that on my own very often. My seat wasn't great in that I couldn't see about 1/3 of the stage, but it was really well blocked so I didn't miss much. It's funny, afterwards I found out that was the theatre my dad ran in the 80's/90's so we had a good chat about it afterwards. I think we both miss when we worked in the same industry and could call and talk about what was currently happening. I kind of regret that I left my city when I started my career because we could have had some neat parallel experiences, but at the same time I don't know that I would have been able to get out of his shadow if I stayed. He's a pretty well recognized name and we have a somewhat uncommon shared last name. Even on the other side of the country people would still recognize the name every once in awhile, but for the most part I got to be my own artist here.

Our conversation went from theatre and the musical to the Black Lives Matter movement happening in my city. I was surprised to hear my dad be so unsupportive, but we had a really good debate and I think he was starting to consider the other side by the time we both realized we had to go, which is all I can really ask of him at the moment. I think he'll come around. For an older cis het white man my dad is pretty amazing at recognizing his privilege and addressing it. Better than some of the people in my age group to be honest. I don't understand it, if a group of people says something is harming them why is it easier to hold onto emotional comfort than to make a change that makes someone else feel safe, or even repairs damage done? How does one person's emotional comfort make anything better?

Speaking of emotional comfort. I effed up hard. I was trying so hard not to tell Grey about the anxiety, and just work through it on my own and then after about five hours of trying I broke and told him. He was great, we both recognized that it was a very emotional reaction. Except then he mentioned something about discussing plans with Fiona and I *way* overreacted and basically leapt to the worst case assumption in a single bound instead of calmly discussing it with him. He snapped, which maybe isn't the best response to a thing but also I think I would have snapped on the other side too, and said he felt like he had to ask permission before seeing her and I just felt physically sick. I never want anyone to feel like they have to ask permission from me to spend time with another human. This is so deeply counter to how I want to practice polyamory.

We talked about it and he said it was a decision he was making, but we both agreed that that wasn't a thing either of us wanted in our relationship so he decided to stop and I need to get way way better at receiving news about plans with Fiona. I'm not sure how, there's still such a deep emotional reaction when I hear about her, but I really need to figure this out.
 
It's so funny I thought it had been at least a week since my last post, but apparently it's only been five days.

This was such a packed weekend. Pride events started on the Thursday and just kept going until Monday night and it was great. I've never actually gotten to enjoy Pride in this city because when I worked in theatre we would be loading in a major festival on the same weekend and then when I was with Voldemort he refused to go out at all and he used to get pretty passive aggressive with me if I wanted to go without him.

The less great part of Pride weekend was my cold turned into a full on sinus infection and by Saturday night it was bad enough that I caved and took antibiotics. But the upside is that Grey lives right next to where the festivities took place so we could go out for a couple hours and then run back and nap and then go back out and we had such a great weekend together. I love that it literally doesn't matter what we do, if Grey and I do it together we have a total blast. He's the first person I've been with where after we've been dating for a little bit we can do things like go out clubbing just the two of us and still have a great time.

We tried to meet up with Fiona so I could meet her, but that didn't end up panning out. At one point she had said she was hanging out at her apartment but Grey didn't mention that it was an invitation so I didn't know that we could have gone there but oh well. I got some really good quality time in with my friend Katya. I have a very platonic friend crush on her, she's super involved with a bunch of different things and really aware and interesting to talk to. I also got to have some good chats with one of her partners/my friend. He's one of the other grey-ro's in our group (including me and Grey there are four of us) and we're all pretty similar to each other so it's neat to get to talk because we're all really into a lot of the same topics so conversation can go on for hours.

Pride ended in a really great night out where we were up until about 5am with our friends and I found this outfit that's probably the first time I've felt totally comfortable at a party. It was an oversized black blazer, a bright red and black lace bodysuit and black skinny jeans. It wasn't entirely femme but also not entirely masc and I'm still trying to find where I exist on that spectrum as far as gender presentation, and this felt pretty good and, well, like me.

On Tuesday I had a good therapy session where we started to unpack why I'm struggling with Fiona and we talked about how she's pretty conventionally feminine and performs her gender pretty traditionally, which has generally been a difficult personality type for me to deal with because I don't and I never really have had a lot of desire or success to look and act like my traditional gender. I don't think I'm super masc, like on the spectrum I sit somewhere between femme and androgynous, but it created a lot of tension and difficult situations when I was younger. I don't think that's the whole thing but it's somewhere to start and we'll keep working on unpacking it.

The other big thing that happened on Tuesday was Kerouac and I formally broke up. I think that's ultimately the right choice, he missed a really important anniversary on April 1 and since then things have just been slowly getting worse and it's felt like he's cared less and less and I haven't felt emotionally safe around him so I've probably been coming off as colder and more apathetic. Basically April 1 is when I decided to leave Voldemort, and I really wanted to be around him and Grey that day and do some kind of ritual to say goodbye to all of the bad stuff that came out of that relationship while celebrating the two really great ones I was in. I was really clear about communicating this need for a couple months ahead of time and then the day of Kerouac decided to go to a family dinner with Karen (family dinners happen every week at her house) and didn't tell me until midnight the night before. It was especially important for me that he be there because he was my friend when all of this was happening so he was the only person who had intimately been there and aware of all of it. When I asked him about it he said that Karen had wanted him to come over and he was afraid of saying no because he didn't want to argue with her. It was like this really terrible moment of realizing that my needs were being superseded by Karen's wants/his fear of saying no to Karen's wants. I think that's when our relationship started to end. It wasn't over, but it needed some serious care to be repaired after that and he just kept pulling away more and more instead so eventually I don't think there was much left.

We had initially been talking about descalating and taking a couple weeks to reconfigure but then during the two weeks we weren't really around each other it was like all of this anxiety and tension just dropped away. I wasn't constantly worried about whether he was actually going to let me know when he was available for dates while we still had time, or whether we were going to be able to go to an event together or if he was going to just keep going to all of them with Karen and a lot of the replacement fears I was experiencing with Grey went away and then we were at a party and Kerouac showed up and he hugged Grey and then just like, didn't even really acknowledge me. When I asked him about it he said it was too much energy to walk across the circle of people and I think that kind of cinched it for me because I don't want to be with someone who can't take five steps to show affection, even when things are awkward.

So, we met on Tuesday on a bench in a park near where I used to work, walking into it I don't think I was 100% set on breaking up, but let's call it 90%. He asked me if we should just keep going as normal and I was a little caught off guard because we'd been talking about his mum two seconds before, so I was like "Sure." and then he said that he hadn't wanted to break up, but because I was so difficult to schedule with and he had to do all of the reaching out over the last couple weeks that's what had to happen.

It's kind of another sign how detached I'm feeling at this point because I would have felt really really angry about that before. Our entire relationship has involved a lot of him being really difficult to schedule with and me having to try and guess whether he's in a mood to talk before reaching out and after fourteen days he's ready to call it quits? Not to mention that I've had a sinus infection and been really depressed for almost that whole time, and I've barely been reaching out to anyone but he's super personalized the whole thing. I did mention that part but he didn't seem to really acknowledge it so we traded keys and I said I'd hope we could be friends but obviously to let me know where he was at and then that was that.

I hope we can be friends, we were friends before, but I'm very comfortable with the decision to not be romantic partners anymore. It was a great relationship for a long time and then it wasn't and it's sad, but it also doesn't seem like a good idea to keep trying to push through it. I don't want us to resent each other.
 
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